


Women in the Family

by Doodads



Series: cursed women [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, More In Notes, casual mentions of domestic violence, casual mentions of suicide, kinda angsty, mentions of drug abuse, pre relationship?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:09:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21727312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doodads/pseuds/Doodads
Summary: Karen reflects on the influence of the women in her family.
Relationships: pre Frank Castle/Karen Page
Series: cursed women [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1565992
Kudos: 9





	Women in the Family

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This is kinda sad but I'm hoping that I will maybe continue this one day and give Karen the happy ending she deserves. There are mentions of suicide and domestic violence in regards to the experience of Karen's family members and reference to her past drug use and urges she faces sometimes. Stay safe guys if anything might be triggering for you please don't read but if ya do I hope you enjoy it!

Karen Page was just like her mother. She had grown up hearing this and it would probably be said at her funeral, that is if anybody that knew her mom showed up. She used to never see the similarities, would just smile and nod when her grandmother would say it, when her dad would say it, but the older she gets the more she understands what they meant. She was just like her mother whether she liked it or not because when she looks in the mirror now she sees her mother’s nose, her eyes, her cheekbones, and the hardened look in her eyes are exactly what she sees in the reflection. 

The women on her mother’s side of the family had always been troubled. Her mom had three sisters and they were all raised by a single mother. Karen’s grandmother, Merideth, passed away when she was in fifth grade and she remembered how her mom had picked her and Kevin up from school and took them out to get ice cream before she had broken the news to them. She remembered her strawberry ice cream melting onto her clothes and she didn’t cry, not once. It wasn’t her job to cry, it was her job to take care of her mother for the next month because she had gone into a depression so bad that she could barely get out of her own bed and her dad didn’t know how to handle it, he would just yell anytime he would try to talk to her and she would only respond in one-word responses.

Karen truly realized her responsibility then, she knew that she had to help take care of her family and that she did not have time to be the one to break down and cry. She could think back to the last time she was with her Aunt Lucinda when she grabbed Karen’s cheeks and told her that she had a beautiful soul and she should never let anybody stomp that out of her. Aunt Lucinda hung herself in her home a week after that and Karen realized that her words had been a warning and she worried that she would end up like that one day. She had to learn to protect herself from those that would try and step on her. Aunt Lucinda wasn’t the only one to have her life end so tragically in her family, her Aunt Cara had been murdered by her husband a year before Karen was born, and her other Aunt Miranda shot herself in the head a month after Cara had died.

Now that she is older, she knows that the reason her mother sometimes had a bright gleam in her eyes and let Karen and Kevin stay home from school to help her repaint the living room red, and other times wouldn’t shower for days on end and could barely get herself out of bed long enough to go to the bathroom. Her mom was textbook bipolar disorder and while it used to scare her to see her mom like that, it now broke her heart that she had to live her whole life without getting help for it and infuriates her that her father would just ignore it. She saw that same thing in Kevin and she wondered what he would be like if he was still here, if he would be just like their mother in that way.

Their family was plagued by trouble and death for as long as she could remember and she always wanted to get away from that, meet a good man and settle down and run away from Vermont and not look back. She didn’t want to be another woman of her family that had a tragic ending. She now knows that she is the one responsible for not letting that happen to her but she has had so many moments in her life where she thinks to herself that this is it, this is the last time that a woman of her family will walk this planet, this ends with her. She knows that she should move, get out of New York, never look at Vermont again and maybe move to the west coast, get a house in the woods in Washington and live out her remaining years in peace. She dreams of that sometimes but at the end of the day, she renews her lease at the earliest possible chance.

Her apartment feels like all she has left sometimes. After a long day, she comes home to a quiet home filled with books and a suspicious lack of family pictures and when she breathes in the air, she knows that she is all she has. She long ago got used to the aching hole in her chest where her mother and Kevin used to live and the closest she ever got to filling it was when she would sit outside of Todd’s trailer, long after he had fallen asleep, and get high on whatever would make her forget her life for a minute and let herself just get lost while looking at the stars. She misses being high but she hated who she was when her favorite part of the day was snorting something and she isn’t willing to go back to that, even though it sometimes takes over her brain and the only thing between her and going to find a dealer is imagining the look on her father’s face the last time she saw him, and how much worse it would be if he knew everything she had done since then and that thought sends her straight into her bed.

She thinks about Frank a lot, she thinks about what he would do if she sat down and told him everything, her Aunt Lucinda, Kevin, Westley, the drugs, and her mother. Sometimes she tortures herself with the idea of him being disgusted with her, imagines him telling her that she is exactly the kind of person that he kills, she is apart of the scum that it is his job to clean from Hell’s Kitchen. She kind of wants him to tell her all that, tell her that she is as awful as she worries that she is sometimes and he will put a bullet in her head and leave her to be another woman of her family that died too young and too violently. She thinks that if she could talk to her Aunt Lucinda today and tell her that the only person that stomped out Karen Page’s beauty is herself.


End file.
